Tag: Taxes

As I understand the Republican view of our country, as manifested in the House and Senate budgets, millions of middle class and working families need to see a major reduction in federal programs that help make their lives, and the lives of their kids, a little bit better.

Elected officials are usually voted in to represent their constituents. So why do Republicans in Congress oppose Obama’s plan to raise investment taxes on the rich when two-thirds of Americans think the wealthy aren’t paying enough in taxes?

Roads are crumbling, bridges require repairs, schools need upgrades and public pension systems remain underfunded. How can states and cities find the money to address any of these problems? One way could be through their tax codes.

In one of his last speeches, at Grosse Point, MI., the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., laid out his next campaign, the one he died pursuing. It was not about civil rights for minorities but economic rights for “the other America.”

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) has issued a report showing that at the state and local level, government is, indeed, engaged in redistribution—but it’s redistribution from the poor and the middle class to the wealthy.

With Republican majorities in both houses, the new Congress should begin by focusing on traditional GOP priorities: improving the nation’s sagging infrastructure, reforming an unwieldy tax code and finding ways to boost middle-class opportunity.

In 2008, candidate Obama was lambasted for supposedly endorsing policies of wealth redistribution. Yet only a few years later, the most explicit examples of such redistribution are happening in the states, and often at the urging of Republicans.

Unless we reduce skyrocketing wealth and income inequality, unless we end the ability of the super-rich to buy elections, the United States will be well on its way toward becoming an oligarchic form of society where almost all power rests with the billionaire class.

Millions of tax-paying Americans pick up the check left by multinational corporations that escape their obligations while enjoying all the benefits of doing business in America—including tax credits of up to 33 cents for every dollar of profit—David Cay Johnston writes at Newsweek.

“Why don’t you simply do what other rich folks do? Hide your money offshore so you don’t have to pay any taxes.” Laughter erupted at the table at my sarcastic comment and my question remained unanswered.

The hit “Funny or Die” video casts Kristen Bell as a fed-up Mary Poppins, quitting her “choice” nanny position in protest of earning a minimum wage that has her living below the poverty line. But the timeless Disney character has a good idea about what will make her stay.

The Pentagon is wasting taxpayer dollars on unnecessarily overpriced items like one $600 toilet seat; meanwhile, Virginia cops want to photograph a teenage boy’s erect genitalia as part of their investigation; meanwhile, some thinkers hold that Facebook may be good for science. These discoveries and more after the jump.

This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: What do sex-obsessed nipplephobes and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper have in common? Also: Why the U.S. won’t give American banks the Credit Suisse treatment, and the logic behind Elizabeth Warren for president.

This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: What do sex-obsessed nipplephobes and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper have in common? Also: Why the U.S. won’t give American banks the Credit Suisse treatment, and the logic behind Elizabeth Warren for president.

The Kremlin imagined a very different narrative about Russia playing out this winter; Pierre Omidyar and Glenn Greenwald aim to reinvent journalism; meanwhile, Americans no longer want their taxes to go to paying for public higher education. These discoveries and more after the jump.

Two Los Angeles natives are fighting the city’s outrageous parking tickets and associated fines on the grounds that they violate due process and are “grossly disproportionate to the failure to put a dollar or two in the meter.”

A U.S. Senate subcommittee found that Credit Suisse helped American clients conceal as much as $12 billion from the IRS, but the bank’s CEO, Brady Dougan, said the blame lies with a few employees acting on their own.